Entering search engine meta-data

From Joomla! Documentation

Meta-data is information about the website in the header portion of the webpage. This information is used by search engines to determine the relevance of the give page to the search request it is processing at any given time. This data is constantly collected by various means by all search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and others. The following list is a partial list of things to consider when building and publishing a web site.

GoDaddy hosting has a web site analysis tool to examine your site and report how each of these rules is violated. The report is shaky at best but it helps in identifying your website's weaknesses.

Contents

Title Tags

Well-constructed title tags contain the main keyword for the page, followed by a brief description of the page content. It will be less than 65 characters and avoid using stop words such as: a, if, the, then, and, an, to, etc. Your title tag should also be limited to the use of alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and commas.

Description Tags

Good description tags contain information about the page's content and persuade search engine users to visit your web site. They should be between 25 and 35 words in length.

Keywords Tags

Your keywords meta tag should contain between 5-10 keywords or keyword phrases that are also found in page content.

Heading Tags

Each page of your site should use at least the H1 heading tag for the search engines that examine it when crawling your site.

Page Content

Pages should have between 300 and 700 words of descriptive content that contains the keywords specified in the keywords meta tag for the page. A page's meta tag keywords should also be those that occur most frequently on the page.

Proper Navigation

Each page of your site should contain links to every other page so search engine spiders can find every page. This is a critical step for the proper indexing and page rank distribution of your site.

Proper Sitemap

It's important to use two site maps for your website--an XML version and a static version. The XML table protocol is explained in detail on http://www.sitemaps.org. The static version should sit on a static HTML page and contain links to every other page.

Controlled Crawling

It's important that search engine spiders find your Robots.txt file that guides spiders to pages and directories you want crawled and denies them entry to protected areas of your site.

Duplicate Content/Tags

Because search engines treat web sites as a grouping of pages and not a single entity, each page on your site should be unique so that the tags and content differ between each page. Doing so increases the number of pages that will rank.

Word Density

Pages should contain 300 to 700 words of unique and descriptive content.

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